In "The Birthday Party", a musician becomes the victim of a ritual murder. Everyone implacably plays out the role assigned to them by fate. "The Room" becomes the scene of a visitation of fate when a blind Negro suddenly arrives to deliver a mysterious message.

Stanley Webber is visited in his boarding house by strangers, Goldberg and McCann. An innocent-seeming birthday party for Stanley turns into a nightmare.The Birthday Party was first performed in 1958 and is now a modern classic, produced and studied throughout the world.

Not just an ordinary birthday... "Two of the things Benjamin Hunter received for his twelfth birthday took him completely by surprise: A room and a letter. The room was from his parents. The letter was from his uncle." Ben was just two years old when he and his uncle, Ian, were last together, so Ben didn't remember him. And no one in Ben's family ever talked about the man. Then the letter arrived, changing Ben's life, and changing his family in unexpected ways. And there was the birthday room... Multiple award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Kevin Henkes brings his insightful, gentle, real-world insight to middle grade novels, including: Billy Miller Makes a Wish Bird Lake Moon The Birthday Room Junonia Olive's Ocean Protecting Marie Sun & Spoon Sweeping Up the Heart Two Under Par Words of Stone The Year of Billy Miller The Zebra Wall

Knopf Canada is proud to welcome an internationally acclaimed, award-winning writer with his brilliant novel that tells the story of one of world’s richest and most infamous tycoons. As dawn breaks on a small island late in the summer of 1975, a tycoon wakes up to oversee the final preparations for his daughter’s birthday party. Finding out that she is pregnant by someone he does not approve of, he tries to persuade her to end the pregnancy: his private doctor – and oldest friend – is standing by to perform the procedure. Among the other guests is the tycoon’s ambitious biographer. The story intersperses the riveting events that unfold during the day of the party with the tycoon’s rise to wealth and fame, from childhood in Asia Minor to old age, via Buenos Aires, New York, London and Paris, and the attempts of his young biographer to bring his subject’s true personality to light. The Birthday Party is at once fascinating, revealing and hilarious – a gripping novel that comments upon the art of biography and the invention of a human life.

Do you want to know why Harold Pinter is a figure of such influence and importance in the theatre? Are you studying his plays and looking for help with interpretation? Or do you teach Pinter and need a reliable guide to the plays? The Faber Critical Guide to Harold Pinter gives this and much more, including an introduction to the distinctive features of the playwright's work, a detailed analysis of each of the classic plays and comments on performance.